Balancing brand engagement for Gen Z, millennial and Gen X travelers

The global travel sector has frequently been at the vanguard of technological advances in many areas, especially customer engagement and experience, but how ready are we for the post-digital era we’ve now entered? 

Balancing brand engagement across different generations is ever more challenging. Although millennials and Gen X have happily adopted digitalization, we’re identifying more core differences in behavior with Gen Z.

These digital natives consume information vastly differently to their millennial parents and their expectations of brands are changing accordingly.  A number of scientific studies indicate that Gen Z brains are developing more sophistication when it comes to complex visual imagery, in turn making visual forms of learning and engagement much more effective.

According to Earthweb, “Gen Z constitutes 26% of the total population across the world. This means two billion people are in Gen Z.

Generation Z is one of the most racially- and ethnically-diverse generations across the United States. Nearly 99% of Gen Z’s either owns a smartphone or have access to one.”  Worth noting the majority of Gen Z have reached adulthood with an estimated purchasing power of $44 billion per annum - not all for travel, unfortunately, but our slice of the pie will grow as they mature!

Unlike their parents and grandparents, Gen Z consumers are not happy just buying from a brand to fulfill an immediate want or need. They crave a sense of tribal belonging, immersive, real-life experiences and above all a brand that offers them a purpose and shows commitment to them as individuals while caring about people and the planet.  

Gamification strategies

So how should we embrace Gen Z while ensuring our millennials and Gen X are never forgotten?  Certainly a lot of digital marketing and virtual reality options are already available to the broad travel sector and developing all the time.  Surely every brand has now dipped their toes into some form of social media advertising, and we must have all heard about “gamification marketing,” right?  

Gamifying aspects of direct engagement and rewarding traveler interactions can be a great way of building a feeling of tribe and belonging to your brand community - something Gen Z loves but remember millennials are keen gamers too. 

So far the travel sector has been slow to explore this avenue with only a handful of brands adopting this type of strategy (mainly tourism boards).  Many aspects of traveler engagement lean well towards gamification, especially during the discovery phase, on-trip and post trip.

Many games, particularly open-world platforms, offer some unique opportunities to engage with potential travelers, build loyalty and expand human networks.  Many already actively offer marketplaces and brand partnerships as well as providing a virtual arena for live events like in-game music concerts.  

Take a look at the movie Ready Player One, where companies are buying and selling products to gamers in a virtual world.  Not only is there an opportunity to engage and advertise, but why not think along the lines of your own virtual travel agency embedded in the game or live immersive product experiences - try before you buy!  Certainly the discovery phase for travelers designing their next journey could be well supported through this channel, and with your virtual travel agency open, gamers can buy travel too.  

Immersive technology

Virtual and augmented reality are gaining more traction. There are 50.2 million VR users in the U.S., which is 15% of the country's population. There are over 171 million VR users worldwide and new sales of headsets are expected to top 15 million in 2022.  

This wearable technology is being adopted across many business sectors, travel included. Although many headsets will be purchased by individuals (millennials are the biggest market currently, though probably buying for their kids - that’s their excuse anyway!), it’s worth noting that Gen Z doesn’t only want to engage remotely. For them, the human touch element is also fundamental.  

With this in mind the travel retail space has never been more exciting or more relevant.  Immersive digital screens, VR headsets and even smell generators are getting faster, easier to wear and more powerful almost daily, providing a fun way to interact with brand products and your staff directly. 

These types of concept stores have been rolling out across Europe for a couple of rival “titan” brands, but with costs of this type of hardware decreasing, our “trailblazers” can also participate in this type of approach more easily.

Personalization has long been a goal of most travel brands and with Gen Z’s lifelong digital footprints there is definitely more potential to understand who they are on more meaningful levels. Identifying their aspirations through big data analysis and machine learning is the key.   

But although some great progress has been made in this discipline, too often our industry is focused on putting travelers into specific boxes and selling specific products that we hope fit because a couple of their peers booked similar a few weeks ago.  

I believe we need to be more dynamic and react in real time, partnering with the multiple sources they engage with (other types of business, social networks and virtual assistants) helping us all deliver a more exciting and smooth brand experience where every traveler feels valued and understood every time.

Talking of virtual assistants and the rise of the Internet of Things, CodeGen CEO Harsha Subasinghe believes we’re witnessing, “the beginning of the end” for the internet as we know it and browsers in particular.  

The metaverse is no longer in its infancy, natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) has now developed to a degree where we humans can interact with virtually anything directly.  Just consider what AI can already do; read, write, see, hear, comprehend, speak, smell, touch, move, understand emotions, play games, debate, create and read your mind!  Here at CodeGen we’ve written our own travel focused NLP, and AI was adopted by us very early on. It’s simply fundamental to everything we do.

We’re moving into a world where our personal suite of assistance bots will proactively engage with the world around us, negotiating on our behalf and removing the need for us to concern ourselves with mundane tasks like trying to buy gig tickets for our favorite band, pressing refresh every other second!

Future opportunities

So what could a new Gen Z engagement look like?  Maybe you’ve identified them as a potential traveler based on some of their gaming and other data from the metaverse, and they’ve won an in-game VR experience from you via some soft gamification marketing.  They loved the experience and went off exploring more for themselves, eventually they’ve popped into our virtual travel agency and booked a unique journey prepared solely for them.  

Any mundane information is shared by their assistant bots, your brand bots book and confirm a truly seamless journey and actively monitor, communicating updates pre, on and post trip.  Your real humans keep in regular touch with your traveler, sharing their knowledge and building ongoing relationships.

What does this all mean for travel? What will a travel booking look like in three, five or 10 years’ time?  The answer is I just don’t know, I don’t think anyone does. Will we even be traveling much in 10 years’ time?  None of us can be sure where all these technological advances will take us or how quickly things will change.  

We do know however, that change will happen, again and again, and if recent history tells us anything, it’ll happen much sooner than we think.  Every brand must think about embracing the future, in particular engaging Gen Z now - and don’t forget the first-born Generation Alphas will soon be teenagers!